Topic 460: Jamais Cascio - Open the Future

In a followup to our State of the World discussion for 2013, we've
invited Jamais Cascio to join us for a couple of weeks for more of a
"future of the world" conversation. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine
as one of their Top 100 Global Thinkers, Jamais writes about the
intersection of emerging technologies, environmental dilemmas, and
cultural transformation, specializing in the design and creation of
plausible scenarios of the future. His work focuses on the importance
of long-term, systemic thinking, emphasizing the power of openness,
transparency and flexibility as catalysts for building a more resilient
society. Among other things, Jamais is a master of scenario
development.
Jamais, I'll start with a simple question that probably invites a
complex answer: are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

Depends on the time frame. My typical response to this question is
"I'm a short-term pessimist, long-term optimist" -- that is, I think
that we have the tools and ideas needed to make a better world for all
of us, and (moreover) that we will get there, but things will probably
get worse for most people before we turn things around.
Of course, I could just as reasonably say that I'm optimistic about
the future of certain parts of the world, pessimistic about other
parts. Or optimistic about certain aspects of the future, pessimistic
about others. This ultimately comes down to a philosophy about
foresight that emerged over the past couple of decades, that there
isn't a single Future to predict or forecast, but multiple possible
Futures that we must navigate.
So maybe the most accurate answer is that I'm optimistic about some of
our possible futures, pessimistic about others.

So it's complicated, and prediction is notoriously difficult - better
to identify potential scenarios and understand how to realize the
scenarios that seem most affirmative. Can you give us an example of a
scenario, say five years out, that feels optimistic? And one that feels
pessimistic?

Let me start with a digression. Every foresight professional has
something of a "sweet spot" that she or he likes in terms of how far
out to go with forecasts. Some folks I know love working in the 2-5
year range -- stuff just around the corner, already visible if you know
where to look; others like thinking about the big multi-generational
picture, teasing out the familiar from the foreign world of 50 years
from now. Many professionals like working in the 10 year horizon,
because it's close enough to be comfortable -- we don't think back to
2003 as an Utterly Alien World -- but it's far enough out that there's
space for weird things to happen. And, for US folks, it's two
presidential terms out, so that there's no way that the current person
in office is still in charge -- this makes the politics a bit easier
(and if you want to ask about how political futures get dealt with at
some point, it's a fun problem).
For me, five years is what I'd consider a "short term" forecast.
Changes are subtle, and we're mostly looking for vectors and not points
(that is, direction/force of change, not specific events). Trying to
predict a particular event for a particular time is a mug's game;
anyone who can tell you that they can do that is probably trying to
sell you something.
Right now, the overriding challenge facing us is the global
environment, especially the climate. We're seeing climate
disruption-linked events happening faster and harder than was expected,
even while the world's moving backwards in terms of carbon controls
(e.g., Canada filed the paperwork to withdraw from Kyoto in order to be
able to exploit the tar sands, Germany's carbon emissions are
increasingly rapidly as they replace nuclear plants with coal, China is
being China, etc.). The only place that's seeing any real improvement
is (believe it or not) the United States, and that's because fracking
is allowing us to swap natural gas in for coal.
There's also the state of the global economy. A mild improvement in
the US as well as fear fatigue has allowed us to think that the worst
is over, that everything will be okay in Europe, etc. That's not
necessarily so, and it wouldn't really take much to tip us back into
the "it's all about to fall apart" anxiety of a year or so ago.
Let's just start with those two as big drivers for the next five
years. They're similar forces in some ways, in that neither one can be
dealt with in a single fix. Both will require a mix of adaptation and
direct response. And both operate at irregular paces -- the last few
years of faster-than-expected climate disruption could easily be
followed by a few years of quiescence. For the sake of this exercise,
we could even combine them into a single possibility spectrum (what the
good folks at GBN call an "axis of uncertainty"): at one end, climate
& economic disruption happen more slowly than feared, while at the
other end, climate & economic disruption happen even faster than
feared.
Let's make a countervailing spectrum about response: at one end, we
see the state of the world and finally decide to act, decisively and
wisely; at the other end, we continue to ignore the big picture and
focus on short-term goals.
We can align these two axes against each other, one horizontal/one
vertical, giving us a classic consultant four-box diagram:
1. Things happen more slowly + We decide to act
[this is the wildly optimistic scenario]
2. Things happen more slowly + We continue to ignore the big picture
[this is probably a "status quo" scenario, so a bit pessimistic]
3. Things happen more quickly + We decide to act
[I'd call this the plausibly optimistic scenario]
4. Things happen more quickly + We continue to ignore the big picture
[and this is the especially pessimistic scenario]
One of these two dynamics is out of our direct control -- we can't
really influence whether or not things get worse faster than we'd like
or slower than we'd fear -- so from a planning/strategy perspective,
we'd need to focus on the other. That's easy, no?

What I think I'm hearing is that we actually can influence whether
things get worse faster or slower, but only by deciding to act and and,
having decided, taking effective action.
Getting a broad focus on effective action is a hairy political
problem; even harder to get agreement and forward movement. Is anyone
thinking how to make that happen? I don't think politicians in the U.S.
or anywhere else can see past the next election, if that far.

There are lots of people thinking about how to make that happen, but
(as far as I can see) nobody's hit upon the right combination of idea +
power to make it happen.
You're actually talking about two related but not isomorphic problems:
the first, how to get people motivated to act in service of a better
planet, and the second, what exactly to do to get a better planet.
For the first, there are quite a few people out there with experience
in convincing people to act in ways that they hadn't previously
considered -- we call them advertisers. Electoral campaigns got smart
about bringing them in awhile back, but the handful of tries by the
better planet community have been limited in scope, scale, and time.
Something like this can't be done like trying to get people to buy a
new flavor of Doritos; it has to be done like getting people to elect
someone as President. That kind of immersion, ubiquity, and no doubt
cost. Nobody's been willing to put out that kind of money.
Instead we get hectoring, and scary stories, and Appropriate
Scientific Caution. The last is, unfortunately, probably the biggest
barrier to success. Good scientists know that you always have multiple
causes for any given event, that science is always about doubting your
findings and looking for better explanations than what you have, and
that to be an honest scientist is to make clear what you don't know as
well as what you do. All of that makes for good science, but terrible
marketing.
As for the "what to actually do," David Roberts at Grist.org has done
a pretty good job of laying out the scope of the problem, as well as
exploring the various ways we can respond. The best answer for how to
deal with climate disruption is "start acting in the early 1990s."
Absent a handy chronological undo button, we have to settle for
less-than-best. Unfortunately, the longer we wait, the harder it gets,
and often in a non-linear way: it's a compound interest problem.
And, to add a triple-spin level of difficulty to the challenge, it's
what I've been calling a "long lag" problem. It's not a case where
trigger and result are visibly, immediately linked. It's a case where
the cause and effect are separated by years, even decades. Ocean
thermal inertia, carbon commitment, and myriad other ecoscience
buzzwords all lead up to a troubling observation: the climate
disruption effects we're feeling now aren't the result of carbon we've
put into the atmosphere in 2012, but carbon we put in back in the
1980s. We could stop emitting any anthropogenic carbon right this very
second -- SNAP -- and we'll still see another couple of decades of
warming.
This has a lovely impact on the first problem, too. Because of this
lag, any actions we take to drive down carbon aren't going to have a
visible, palpable result for years. You're going to have a lot of
people complaining that they've had to give up SUVs/steak/a comfortable
21st century US life style for nothing. Hard to generate enthusiasm
with an argument of "you need to sacrifice because of what your
parents/grandparents generation did, and only your
children/grandchildren will benefit."

I thought it was brilliant thinking for Bruce Sterling to take the
climate change concern to designers and futurists - it felt like we
were raising consciousness effectively in the early 2000s, but
mitigation of climate change never has mainstreamed. I've wondered
whether Al Gore's attempt to spread the word via "An Inconvenient
Truth" backfired by politicizing the notion of climate change,
associating it with the left and creating a conservative backlash. How
do we get past that reaction? Climate change should resonate with a
truly conservative mindset, no?

I'm pretty sure that environmentalism already had a "liberal" taint in
the US well before Inconvenient Truth, including the climate issue.
With the main publicly-perceived source of the problem being oil, the
political lines were already drawn.
From a futures perspective, though, Roland's link offers a useful
signal: we (especially in the US) are so accustomed to thinking about
eco policy as a left-wing issue, we shouldn't blind ourselves to the
potential for green arguments to take on new political flavors. *Not*
to become "neutral" issues -- very few things are -- but to take on new
characteristics.
"Green Fascism" is a long-time bugbear of people afraid of
environmentalists going too far, but that term usually means current
leftish eco-policy wrapped in a militarist/top-down costume. But we
should be cognizant of the potential for the opposite to happen, for
hardcore militarist groups to adopt green language.

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Is anybody aligning an analysis of the climate change future with an
analysis of the political future, and offering preferred scenarios for
best case outcomes (for the human race, that is, acknowledging that the
planet would do well enough if humans vacated en masse)?

Anybody? Almost surely. Anybody with significant visibility or pull?
Not that I've seen, unless you count the scenarios worked on by (say)
the CIA's Center for Climate Change and National Security.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamais_cascio/6214330683/in/photostream
From what I've seen, the places that are putting the most effort into
figuring out mixed political/climate scenarios are places looking for
explicit advantage in a difficult time.

Jamais,
A broad question I've been meaning to email you about privately but
here goes. Technically, could we move to clean energy now... and by
now, I mean over say a 10 year period but not cultivating any new dirty
resources now? And does nuclear need to be a part of that?

We see scenarios being embraced by organizations and people all the
time. But the challenge is getting people to act, especially with
something as abstract as climate change. How can scenarios and
foresight more be more effectively integrated into the everyday
decision making processes of people and organizations?

RU: My answer is going to sound weaselly, but it's more a reflection
of how bloody complex this situation is: It depends on what you mean by
"we," "move," and "clean."
We: the world, the US, developed nations in general, leading
polluters...?
Move: replacement of current+projected energy use, or lower energy
production + efficiency and/or restrictions?
Clean: 100% non-carbon, or with low-carbon alternatives as
stepping-stones?
Here's the scope of the challenge: we're currently using every year
about 20-22 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, globally (so this
doesn't count transportation fuels). Of this, about 8 trillion KWh
comes from nuclear, hydro, and renewables. Ten years from now, we're
looking at an annual electricity footprint of about 27 trillion KWh,
with maybe 11-12 coming from nuclear, hydro, and renewables, at current
rates of increase. To dump all carbon energy, we'd have to replace
upwards of 15 trillion kilowatt-hours of generating power (or 15,000
terawatt-hours); for comparison, in 2010 the world added about 15
terawatt-hours of solar.
But remember, if we're talking total energy replacement, we need to
shift everyone to electric vehicles. Add another 15,000 terawatt-hours
on top of that, at least.
And the cost of building all of that stuff. And tearing up/replacing
the infrastructure.
(You can see more detail, and links to the numbers I'm using, at this
post: http://www.openthefuture.com/2012/02/got_the_time.html)
Nuclear will definitely have to be part of this, as getting rid of it
means needing roughly another 5,000 TWh on top of what I just listed
(based on current numbers). Nuclear doesn't have to mean our current
model, however; I've been a big fan of Thorium nuclear for awhile now,
and it looks like China is about to embark on a major Thorium nuclear
build-out.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/china-moving-to-thorium-as-sa
fe-nuclear-fuel/story-fnciihm9-1226550688296
(Short version: cheap, plentiful, lower radioactivity, much shorter
half-life, cleaner waste, little weaponization potential.)
A radical push on efficiency will help, but the sheer logistics of the
transition argues that we're looking at a multi-decade project for
clean energy.
From a climate perspective, our first goal needs to be to get rid of
coal. We could plausibly stop using coal, globally, within the decade,
although that would definitely mean more use of natural gas (hence more
fracking).

Gabriel, that's an excellent question. I think the answer comes down
to a combination of practice and result. That is, the more practice and
experience people have with foresight and scenario thinking, the
easier it will be to use it for complex topics; and the more we can
point to visible benefits resulting from the use of scenario thinking,
the easier it will be to convince people to use it.
So, easy.
I do think that it's ultimately a part of a 21st century education
model. We need to be weaving complexity and long-term thinking into our
pedagogy.

The education model itself is changing. We're getting better at online
learning, peer2peer learning, massive open online courses and other
ways to connect to worldwide networks of knowledge.
Add to this the information we're getting from the rapidly increasing
use of sensors, big data and visualization techniques, and maybe we
could hope for a scenario in which the world will learn about itself
more rapidly and efficiently - increasing the awareness of climate
issues, but also of social problems?
Just as our electronic health tracker thingies can suggest remedies
and alternative lifestyles, maybe this combination of worldwide
education and information will make it more obvious how we should
organize our cities and societies?

That's certainly the hope of many of the folks working on smart
cities/quantified life projects. It's argument I've used myself -- that
"making the invisible visible" can change behavior. It seems to work
best for fairly simple cause-effect relationships, though: seeing my
minute-by-minute mileage lets me alter my immediate driving, e.g., but
doesn't do anything to change my overall mobility habits.
One of the important lessons for anyone engaged in foresight-based
strategy, policy-making, and the like is that *people are busy*. I've
too often seen strategies and ideas based on the need for people to do
a top-to-bottom re-evaluation of their lives, to completely re-orient
themselves based on emerging knowledge, and the like -- sorry, that's
just not going to work. Most people don't have the extra time to do
that kind of thing, and see whatever leisure time they have as
precious. This isn't an insult or condescension, it's realism. If we
want people to make better choices, we have to make the better choices
the *obvious* choices.

Hey Andrew
The main weakness of sequestration-based plans, in general, is finding
the spot that balances the speed of carbon uptake, the degree of
afforestation required to make a real dent, and the amount of land
required. From my reading, food crops don't make for great carbon
sequestration tools. Biochar is (again, from what I've read) the best
bet. Still a big question as to whether it can happen fast enough to
make a difference.

Jamais, Thank you for answering questions here about the state of the
future!
I'm primarily interested in two things. Energy, and Automation.
Part 1: Peter Diamandis is fond of saying that if we solve our energy
problem, we solve our water problem. He means that with enough energy,
we can filter all the sea water we want, no more shortages. I think
this is a gross understatement, and if we were to solve our energy
problem, we would solve nearly Every problem. With enough energy the
cost of nearly every aspect of life would plummet: transportation
especially leads to cascading costs in production etc, but also in food
and generally the cost of living.
Part 2: Automation and AI are gaining widespread attention in the
role they're playing in the slowed job growth and stagnated wages, in
spite of recovered GDP and corporate profits. MIT's Andrew Mcafee and
Erik Bynjolfson lay it out best in their recent work "Race Against the
Machine" which projects AI and robotics to achieve human capability in
every capacity for which we have a market. Thus: no jobs. Returns to
capital skyrocket and returns to labor disappear.
Question 1: Is there an energy solution you would take seriously in
achieving a "squanderable abundance of energy"? Cold Fusion is
receiving some dubious (if not outright indignant) attention; more
credibly, Ray Kurzweil projects that Solar Power will continue its
exponential growth to provide 100% of our needs by 2029. Is there an
energy source that can save us?
Question 2: I too am a long term optimist, short term pessimist, and
technological unemployment is a huge part of that. With jobs
disappearing, consumers will no longer have purchasing power; This
leads to a spiral towards the bottom as companies that need to cut
costs to survive lagging demand further automate, thus eliminating yet
more consumers. I've yet to hear a satisfactory solution to this
problem in the short term (10 years). What would you suggest? Is this
something you're even concerned about?

Hi, Jamais - long time, no talk! :)
Matthew Price raises a spectre in passing that's very much part of my
new work-life, and that's the question of water. There's a lot of
rhetoric around at the moment about potential wars resulting from
water-shortage (and, intriguingly enough, a counter-narrative from a
lot of climate-related disciplines that contend i) it won't come to
that, and ii) that said rhetoric is a result of the militarisation of
climate research topics, which can be a rich source of funding).
Now, these shortages are very real, but what gets missed out of the
debates is that there's actually loads of water about, it's just -- in
true Gibsonian fashion -- unevenly distributed. The economic concept of
'virtual water' is starting to unpack how those uneven distributions
occur, and revealing a sort of economic colonialism, wherein poor
countries end up exporting scarce water in the form of its embodiments
in consumer goods or foods (e.g. Pakistan, cotton), but also where that
export is a central plank of the local economy... leaving us with yet
another complex system of inequity to untangle, where solving the
first-order problem will actually cause a whole bunch of repercussions
which may be, in the medium term, even worse than leaving things as
they are.
I could wander in all kinds of directions with this, but to cut to a
big-picture point that's a daily worry for me: so many of our
contemporary global economic and climate issues boil down to the
stubbornness of sovereignty and the grubby politics of territory and
resources. However, it feels like we're swinging hard back toward
nation-statism, and a situation where everyone finally convinced of
climate change's actuality reaches the conclusion "well, screw 'em,
we're doing OK and I don't see why we should be the first to make
sacrifices". How do you see things playing out on the axis of
internationalism over the next decade or so? And do you see any hope
for progress without a concomitant move toward a genuine structure of
global governance and cooperation?

(cracking knuckles in preparation)
Algae-bloom sequestration: oh oh, now you've done it. That's
geoengineering, and I've written and spoken extensively on the subject.
I could go on for days on this.
The short answer is this: the ecological side-effects are still hazy,
but there's evidence that they could be very bad (as in, "sterilizing
part of the ocean" bad). The actual sequestration impact is still being
debated; one small experiment seemed to show no impact, another seemed
to show moderate impact. The likelihood of something bad happening
increases as you try to scale this up to make a real difference in a
short time.
Aside: one of the things about environmental problems and the climate
and such that most people don't get is that quite often the problem
comes not from the *scale* of the change, but from the *speed* of the
change. CO2 levels, temperatures, etc. have all gone up and down over
geological history, and plants and animals adapt... except those
historical changes happen over the course of millennia, not years.
We're doing to the atmosphere in under a century what could naturally
occur over the course of tens of thousands of years.. Same kind of
thing here with the algae -- the bloom & uptake process isn't a problem
when it happens slowly, but trying to get a megabloom to happen in a
matter of days/weeks/months is asking for trouble.

Matthew: solar is definitely in the category of an energy source that
could, eventually, be "too cheap to meter" (ahem); I'd also put
geothermal heat pumps in that category, at least potentially. Lots of
energy there that can be tapped (simply through heat exchange).
Ray K's assertion about solar is, like many Kurzweil observations,
insightful when it comes to technology and eye-rolling when it comes to
anything else. I have no reason to dispute the idea that by 2029 we'd
have the ability to produce enough solar power generation to power the
planet cheaply, but go back to my post a few days ago about the scale
of the problem. The logistics alone of replacing all of that
infrastructure, building the facilities, replacing vehicles, etc etc
etc mean that this is very likely a multi-decade process. I suppose
that a crash program starting today might get us there in 15 years, but
I don't see that happening.
Unless... unless we have some pretty significant breakthrough in
molecular-scale/"atomically-precise" manufacturing. That might speed
things up, although it could just as easily make a mess of things if it
triggers conflict (which it could).
Jobs: As it happens, I *have* written about this
(http://www.openthefuture.com/2012/05/the_pink_collar_future.html), and
it's a focus of a good bit of work with my colleagues at the Institute
for the Future. The ten year period you mention is probably best
thought of as the political transition period; the real fix for this
problem isn't likely to get much support now, but seems ultimately
inevitable: basic income guarantees.
(See also:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1334602/three-possible-economic-models-part-1
and
http://www.fastcompany.com/1339945/three-possible-economic-models-part-ii)

Paul, bunker mentalities often lead to bad endings. That "screw those
other guys" attitude is unfortunately fairly commonplace, and
especially so (in my experience) with the leaders in up-and-coming SEDN
(super-empowered developing nations) like China and India. I had an
argument about climate with a Chinese industrial chief a few years ago,
where he insisted that the US had to solve everything and let the
Chinese develop without hindrance, and simply did not want to hear that
US acting alone wouldn't be enough to solve the climate problem.
So what changes attitudes? "Carrots and sticks" is the usual cliché.
Sticks -- threats or acts of violence, force, power -- not only have to
be meaningful, they have to be worse than the alternative. When the
alternative is the world going to hell, that's a tall order. Carrots --
inducements, rewards, benefits -- offer a better strategy. The best
kind is the "demonstration carrot," where you don't even have to try to
cajole the others to act, you simply have to show that what you're
doing is *so* much better now that you've gone clean
energy/hyper-efficiency/etc..
As for global governance, not until there's an external
threat/challenge. Fuzzy one-worlders like me & thee should focus more
on mechanisms of collaboration, cooperation and transparency than on
trying to figure out how to create an actual world government. (That's
the Waltzian-neorealist international politics grad student in me,
btw.)

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